Should people be allowed to say and write lies in a "real" democracy?
Yes. In democracy, the public are the arbiters of truth. Particularly political truth.
Free speech doesn’t mean consequence-free speech. Cooling-down periods, mandatory preservation and disclosure requirements, et cetera are both prudent and commonplace. Court-supervised anti-fraud statute, which punishes for the harm done by the lie, not the speech itself, also helps.
Governments should not have the power to silence their critics. It’s a conflict of interest between the rulers and the ruled, and historically marches towards poverty, misery and instability.
That would require the slandered party (a) prove it’s false and (b) demonstrate harm. There is also good reason for most slander and libel law withholding many remedies from public figures and politicians.
In this case, a department of a single-party city-state issued a takedown notice against allegations of election tampering. It is as illegitimate as it is Streisand-effect inducingly stupid.
I think somewhere you have to accept that certain statements aren't true or false. What has changed recently is the willingness of people to view the statements of others as "lying" as opposed to having a different opinion. Unf, when the plaintiff is the government this becomes even more tricky (and I think a reasonable person would conclude that the PAP have used the legal system to supress criticism...I love Singapore, I love LKY...but it is what it is).
The answer is nobody. You have no recourse unless you're in the US or one of the few other states that Facebook will listen to.
There is no way to deduce the truth using the tools in the Government's toolbox or in public discourse. The more questions systems like the courts have to answer the more mistakes they will make; they aren't for discerning the truth instead only checking that standards of evidence have been met. There are a bunch of things that are untrue but that can be demonstrated to a high standard of evidence.
When governments try to do things that are impossible there are unwelcome side effects. Since they logically can't police the truth any attempt to do so will not have the intended outcome.
Eh, the history of science is littered with these. From early theories of vision involving beams cast out by our eyes [1] to phlogiston [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_theory_(vision)
EDIT: autocorrect
There simply isn't a formal way of determining truth. If there was it'd be in use somewhere. All the processes that work best are ones where decisions are made in a fair process where evidence is invoked, but there isn't a reasonable argument that evidence always paints an accurate picture. It simply can't. There is no process that gets all the decisions right; evidence based decision making is not enough.
If it turned out courts correctly identified the truth 80% of the time when working through cases I'd be impressed. And that is where we have formal experts doing their best with controls against bias and the potential to have independent judges making decisions. The best legal standard we have is 'beyond reasonable doubt' - I've been in plenty of situations where that standard would accept a bad conclusion; eminently reasonable people who try to make good, thoroughly considered decisions still make mistakes. Reasonable people were once extremely sexist and racist; for an easy example. For something as wide-ranging as political truth there is simply no hope.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_i...
> But governments should not have the power to decide if criticism is truthful or not
They do, though. And for good reason, too. You wouldn't want to lose your job over a fraudulent hitpiece.
None of these are like the allegations of election tampering the article discusses, which is squarely in the realm of First Amendment-protected speech in America.
(What’s that you say? The truth of claims about the medical efficacy of drugs are actually hard to ascertain? That’s true, but you’ll note that the standard of truth required by law is easy to ascertain — the question is not whether your drug cures cancer but whether you’ve gone through a specific FDA-approved process to test whether it does, and passed.)
In court trials, the smallest details of truth are liable to be deliberated and argued over extensively, often producing outcomes that satisfy no interested parties.
It’s easy to have an opinion about what is an “outright lie”, it’s more or less impossible to prove it, and it is literally Orwellian to establish an authority to preside over it.
Except the courts... in fact nobody, has any power to punish anyone for most of the fake news spread on Facebook in my country since it's all posted by anonymously controlled pages.
> Governments should not have the power to silence their critics
I agree completely, but we are talking about the case when they are trying to silence a lie. That's different than critics.
In theory, a deliberate, malicious false statement against a public figure would count as libel; but in practice basically everything is allowed. This prevents politicians from intimidating their critics with lawsuits.
EDITED TO ADD: In fact in the US there is pretty much a constant stream of false statements about every politician, and I can't recall any politician ever winning a libel case. Devin Nunes is trying currently, and basically making a fool of himself.
"This content has been determined to be fake: [evidence or link to evidence]"
That would be my preference.
So
If you were to slap a content disclaimer saying 'this content is fake', they would just use that as fuel and proof that the government doesn't want you to know the truth. The lie directly harms people by simply existing even if you add a disclaimer.
Sadly, they are increasingly the arbiters of scientific truth. Part of me keeps expecting to hear some senator calling for the repeal of the law of gravity.
(that includes paper publishes as well authors).
I am interested however to learn/understand opinions of how to make the situation better.
For example, updating insensitive model that would include critical reviews of published work, independent confirmation of published work, and so on.
There could be a bias-adjustment model where if heavy majority of the government or business grants are looking for a particular 'answer' within a given subject-area, there need to be a counter-balance model (that, again, incentivizes a plausible discourse)
Today's intensives model for academia, appears to give lot of weight to # of papers being published.
In the areas where statistical significance of experiments/observations (rather than provable theoretical result) plays an important role -- this particular measure of 'one's academic achievement', could be responsible for the 'trust issues'
Is that a decree by the state? The result of an expensive and protracted legal process? Do we put it to a vote? Is there a Committee of Truth? A permit system? Digital signatures on all postings, with co-signees and chains of responsibility? Or do we just wind up with he usual weak and unevenly enforced rules, subject to bribery and political influence?
Forbidding speech is a slippery and precipitous slope. A government that aims to protect its people from lies is well on the road to despotism.
Follow up question: should a real democracy have a Ministry of Truth?
For example, everyone seems to agree that ISIS videos should be removed.
Of interest: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/does-th...